I’m a long-time fan of Edmond Hamilton’s science fiction, and I do mean long-time since I was reading the paperback reprints of his Captain Future novels almost sixty years ago. But I knew he wrote some horror stories as well, and since I’m trying to read a little horror fiction this month, I opened my copy of THE VAMPIRE MASTER AND OTHER TALES OF HORROR to read the title yarn, the novel-length “The Vampire Master”, which was serialized in WEIRD TALES from October 1933 to January 1934 under the pseudonym Hugh Davidson.
“The Vampire Master” is an occult detective story, with the protagonist being Doctor John Dale, a noted investigator into the eerie and strange. The narrator is his secretary and assistant Harley Owens. Doctor Dale is headquartered in New York City, and as the story opens, he and Owens are being visited by a physician from a town in upstate New York, in the Hudson River valley, concerning a woman who has recently died from a strange malady resembling extreme anemia. Now the woman’s daughter seems to have come down with the same condition. Why, it’s almost like something is draining the blood from their bodies!
Well, we all know where this is going. Doctor Dale doesn’t beat around the bush. A vampire is to blame for what’s happening, and before you know it, they’re all off to the small town to wage war against the evil of vampirism.
Please don’t mistake those comments for snark. Is “The Vampire Master” a very traditional story? Yes, it is. Every bit of vampire lore in it comes straight from DRACULA, both the book and the movie, the latter of which had come out only two years earlier. Of course, Hamilton was influenced by it. This is a very straightforward tale, and like a traditional Western, it rises or falls depending on how well the author makes use of those familiar elements.
I’m happy to report that for the most part, Hamilton does a pretty good job. As the menace of the vampires widens and claims more and more victims, there are some genuinely creepy scenes. The Vampire Master, who has returned to the Hudson River valley after being run out two hundred years earlier, is a suitably despicable villain. There are no sympathetic vampires here. They’re all thoroughly evil, although some through no fault of their own.
There are two flaws in this story, starting with the fact that it’s too long. Stretching the plot out to novel length means that events start to get a little repetitious before it’s over. And the second problem is that for a famous occult detective, Doctor John Dale is strangely ineffective. His plans to combat the vampires never work and he and his allies suffer defeat after defeat until they finally triumph. Maybe Hamilton was just trying to show how dangerous the Vampire Master is, but I kept thinking, dang, Jules de Grandin would have wrapped this up a lot quicker, before quite so many people died.
And speaking of Jules de Grandin, the issue of WEIRD TALES in which the first installment of the serialized version appears sports one of the most iconic, instantly recognizable covers in pulp history, the Bat-Woman by Margaret Brundage. Also in that issue are a Conan story by Robert E. Howard (“The Pool of the Black One”), a Jules de Grandin story by Seabury Quinn (“The Mansion of Unholy Magic”), stories by H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Jack Williamson, and Mary Elizabeth Counselman, and a Cthulhu Mythos story by an author I’d never heard of, Merle Prout. Yep, just another day at the newsstand for WEIRD TALES.
Don’t let my mild criticism scare you off from reading “The Vampire Master”. Hamilton’s fast-moving prose is a pleasure to read, as always, and as I mentioned, there are some really nice creepy scenes and a sense of gathering doom. He wrote another story featuring Doctor John Dale, “The House of the Evil Eye”, and I intend to read it before the month is over. In the meantime, the collection THE VAMPIRE MASTER AND OTHER TALES OF HORROR, published by Haffner Press, seems to be out of print, but used copies can be found for a reasonable price. If you want an e-book edition of “The Vampire Master” without the other stories, that can be had on Amazon.
No comments:
Post a Comment